Democratic backsliding, the slow erosion of institutions, processes, and norms, has become more pronounced in many nations. Most scholars point to the role of parties, leaders, and institutional changes, along with the pursuit of voters through what Daniel Ziblatt has characterized as alliances with more extremist party surrogate organizations. Although insightful, the institutionalist literature offers little reflection about the growing role of social technologies in organizing and mobilizing extremist networks in ways that present many challenges to traditional party gatekeeping, institutional integrity, and other democratic principles. We present a more integrated framework that explains how digitally networked publics interact with more traditional party surrogates and electoral processes to bring once-scattered extremist factions into conservative parties. When increasingly reactionary parties gain power, they may push both institutions and communication processes in illiberal directions. We develop a model of communication as networked organization to explain how Donald Trump and the Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement rapidly transformed the Republican Party in the United States, and we point to parallel developments in other nations.

As Black Lives Matter protests swept across the United States in recent years, protesters encountered a mix of police reactions: Some news reports described police in military gear and widespread arrests, whereas others reported minimal police involvement. We developed an original dataset of BLM protests that shows that police reactions varied widely, even when comparing protests with similar messages and tactics. We then investigated this variation with a survey experiment and found that observers are more likely to describe protesters as violent when a protest is met with a heavy police presence. These findings highlight the role of the police in shaping public perceptions of violence and social movements and extend a growing body of empirical research on BLM by shifting the focus from protest activity to the impact of protest policing.

In his last finished work, The Law of Peoples (1999b), John Rawls wrote repeatedly of “our hope for the future.” In recent decades hope has become a recurrent trope in the politics of Anglo-American liberal democracies. Yet its appearance in a major work by the most influential political theorist of the postwar era has attracted little notice. Rawls’s discovery of the need for hope in liberal society represents a major development in his thought and a little-noticed departure from his previous thinking about moral psychology, stability, and theodicy. Situating this episode in the evolution of Rawls’s thought and the context of intellectual history sheds light on the wider issue of the ambivalent relationship between hope and liberalism.

Is smaller better for economic development? We argue that states’ past population size can be a powerful determinant of current development. Among states that gained independence shortly after World War II, states with smaller populations in their early years of independence had stronger incentives to adopt more open trade policies and employ larger public sectors. These policies “embedded” smaller newly independent states into the global economy during the Cold War, building the foundations for more inclusive economic institutions and greater political stability. When the Cold War ended, smaller newly independent states were more likely to have developed the institutional infrastructure to prosper in the globalizing yet politically volatile early twenty-first century. We test this argument by examining the developmental trajectories of 83 states that became independent between 1946 and 1975. Newly independent states with smaller populations during this period have had on average higher levels and rates of post-Cold War development. They also had more open trade policies and larger public sectors during the Cold War. These policies correlate with more inclusive economic institutions and greater political stability in the post-Cold War era. A comparative case study of Oman and the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen illustrates the mechanisms linking the size of newly independent states at independence and their post-Cold War development.

In authoritarian regimes, governments regularly use overt and heavy-handed visual propaganda to effectively signal regime strength and deter protests. Can democratic leaders also use this so-called hard propaganda to project strength, or does this kind of authoritarian-style messaging potentially backfire because of societal norms for leaders’ behavior? Focusing on a rare instance in which outright visual hard propaganda was used in a democratic setting, we study how US citizens perceived its use by the Trump administration during the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests. In a preregistered online survey fielded from June 12 until June 16, 2020, we exposed participants from both sides of the political spectrum to randomized pairs of real-world propaganda images. This allowed us to explore how partisanship influenced perceptions of hard propaganda during the height of the protests. Our findings reveal that, compared to standard political messaging, hard propaganda can communicate greater strength to both government supporters and opponents in a democracy. Yet, in contrast to autocratic settings, it fostered opposition among Trump opponents. Trump supporters, however, did not find such propaganda any more or less appropriate than standard political communication, consistent with an increased acceptance of authoritarian practices within polarized democracies.

This paper systematically explores incompatibilities between nuclear weapons and democracy. Based on a procedural definition of democracy, it argues that nuclear weapons’ relationship with democracy is defined both by inherent limitations stemming from the features of nuclear weapons and by assumptions about the requirements of nuclear strategy. It concludes that although ideas on the requirements of nuclear strategy modify the level of compatibility between nuclear weapons policy and democracy, none allow for sufficient compatibility. Excessive power concentration with executives, limitations on advance agreement on nuclear strategy, and secrecy can all be avoided with different assumptions about the requirements of nuclear strategy, in particular nuclear deterrence. However, the destructivity and speed of nuclear wars mean that they inherently cannot be subject to adequate control. Equally, they cannot be subject to control by a sufficiently inclusive demos. Thus, nuclear weapons are incompatible with democracy, but significant democratization of nuclear policy is possible.

This article tells the story of one small department in the Israeli Ministry of Justice: “The Inspector for Complaints Against General Security Service (GSS) Interrogators” (in Hebrew: Mavtan). Tasked with examining complaints of torture in GSS interrogations, and determining whether they merit launching a criminal investigation, Mavtan has reviewed more than 1,450 complaints to date. None of these, however, had ever led to criminal charges. By analysing this failure, we tell a segment of the story of torture in Israel and, more broadly, of the legal bureaucracy that makes state and colonial violence possible. Despite the failure to produce concrete outcomes, Mavtan is a very industrious unit. We argue that this extensive bureaucratic labor creates a semblance of the rule of law by performing an adherence to hallmarks of good governance, such as transparency and accountability. Paraphrasing Mitchell (1999), we call this semblance the “legitimacy effect,” as it works to produce state legitimacy on two levels: internationally, to cordon off external interventions, and domestically, to defuse the internal tension between torture and democracy. It hence allows torture to emerge as a problem that may be addressed procedurally, without ever contending with the violence and the violations of international law it necessarily entails.

For much of the past fifteen years, the Middle East and North Africa have been witnessing the largest proportion of conflicts in the world. Long and bloody wars in Syria, Yemen, Iraq, and Libya drove the trend through the 2010s, followed by a respite in 2022 and then by another particularly brutal wave of conflict over Israel/Gaza and in Lebanon in 2023/2024. Given the prevalence of violence in the Middle East, one would expect that a sizeable part of the conflict studies scholarship draws on research from and about the region—especially as it is a hub for phenomena of broader interest to academics of civil wars such as foreign fighters, proxy wars, rebel governance, and non-state armed groups. Yet evidence suggests that publications drawing on empirical research from the region constitute less than 5% of all articles on conflicts in political science journals (Melani Cammett and Isabel Kendall, “Political Science Scholarship on the Middle East: A View from the Journals,” PS: Political Science & Politics, 54(3), 2021). The reasons for the under-representation of Middle East scholarship in conflict research are understandable. The prevalence of war/instability makes it difficult to collect data in systematic ways, and the language skills and contextual knowledge required to compensate for this lack of standard data are in short supply among political scientists.

This article explores Leo Strauss’s thoughts on Alexis de Tocqueville in his 1954 “Natural Right” course transcript. One of the significant features of this transcript is that it contains an original interpretation and tentative critique of Tocqueville’s political philosophy. Although Strauss considered Tocqueville to be an indispensable observer of modern liberal democracy, he saw significant limits to Tocqueville’s thought. By comparing him with Aristotle and Nietzsche, among others, Strauss criticizes Tocqueville’s understanding of justice, history, and democracy. Strauss concludes that Nietzsche offers a more profound critique of liberal democracy, but one that leads to right-wing extremism. Strauss urges his students to be satisfied with Tocqueville’s more moderate and humane criticisms. Although Strauss’s tentative critique is illuminating and worth careful consideration, I challenge his interpretation and offer a Tocquevillian response to his overly intellectualized conception of social and political change.

The contemporary field of American political behavior lacks a methodological tradition of in-depth interviews and ethnographic fieldwork. In this article, we illustrate the causes and consequences of this gap and argue for a renewal of methodological pluralism. First, we situate the current dearth of qualitative approaches within two key methodological debates during the behavioral turn in political science, showing that scholars initially embraced open-ended interviews and fieldwork but that these methods were ultimately sidelined. Although qualitative approaches persisted in historical and institutional research on American politics, their marginalization within the field of American political behavior has come at significant conceptual cost. Second, to redress this loss, we draw on existing discussions of the comparative advantages of qualitative methods to propose a framework for reintegrating interviews and ethnography into the study of American political behavior. We identify four “modes of inquiry” that should inform qualitative and mixed-methods research design in the subfield: innovating theoretically through the discovery of surprising findings, innovating theoretically through research design and case selection, identifying how contexts shape meaning-making, and tracking dynamic processes of change.

This article reviews the data quality of the first systematic global measurement of academic freedom, the Academic Freedom Index (AFI), by using a data quality assessment approach proposed by McMann et al. (2022). By analyzing three distinct components of data quality (content validity, the data generation process, and convergent validity), we examine the specific strengths and potential shortcomings of the AFI. The findings indicate that the AFI does well in terms of its theoretical embeddedness (within some conceptual limits), of the transparent data generation process, and the handling of expert assessments, as well as of its temporal and spatial coverage. A critical assessment of the level of disagreement between expert coders further shows that there are few systematic predictors, providing no evidence for problematic biases among AFI coders. Overall, we conclude that the data quality of the AFI is comparatively high but that it could be further increased by recruiting even more experts and thereby enhancing the Bayesian IRT model’s performance.

In an effort to manage carbon emissions, nitrogen runoffs, and other externalities, governments are increasingly resorting to a drastic policy measure: paying workers to stop working. Though such initiatives may be, strictly speaking, welfare enhancing, they are increasingly politicized, and often meet with protests. What explains public attitudes to “wage buyouts”? This article compares the explanatory power of two ideal-type theories in deriving a set of testable expectations. The first views work primarily as a means of earning a living; the second envisions it as a source of personal identity and social recognition. We test these opposing accounts using three survey experiments fielded on a combined sample of over 7,500 U.S. respondents. Overall, a sizeable portion of workers are resistant to being freed from work. Strikingly, individuals are more willing to reduce their work hours by half than to cease work entirely, even when offered full compensation. Those whose occupations are threatened by structural factors like offshoring or automation show lower identification with their jobs, and are accordingly more willing to accept government compensation for giving up those jobs. Program design matters: respondents are significantly more likely to accept compensation from their former employer than from the government. While partisanship drives attitudes towards government handouts, it is not significantly associated with attitudes towards (non)work. On the other hand, Protestants show consistently greater resistance to non-work, even when this results from a lottery windfall. These findings hold significant implications for climate and technology-driven labor displacement in years to come.